YouSaid · the spoken record

Lars Doucet

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-01-09
most recent: 2023-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's like, I mean, it's more complicated than this, but if there's any vacant lots in the area and they're selling for anything. Still land rent in that property.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's the thing empirically, if the land value, basically, if the land selling price has dropped to zero, then you are fully capturing all of the land rents. And if it's above zero, you have not captured all of the land rents.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, are you concerned about the societal effects of the depreciation of land prices, or are you more concerned about just the calculation issue?”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, some important to remember that land selling value is derived from land rental value, not the other way around. So land selling value is the net present value of the future flow of income that can be generated from the property. So the properties inherent productivity is kind of inherent to it. And the selling price of it is based off of, you know, the capitalization of that value minus the expectation of any taxes, right? Right. And so 100% land value tax will theoretically reduce the selling price to zero. But the land will still be as productive as it always was. It's just that the flow of those rents are being redirected, right? And so that's the thing is that, and also in mass appraisal, one of the things you do is you decapitalize the effect of the tax.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And for any edge case like a poor, sympathetic widow who has no income and but has a high value home, you just make it so she doesn't have to pay the land value tax until she dies or sells the estate.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know so, how do you grapple with that? And I think it's something that Georgists need to grapple with because we can't just imagine a future utopia without accounting for being fair to people who play by the rules, including people like myself. Like I'm a homeowner, right? Am I intending to screw over myself and everyone like me? And so I think this is where it's really important to do the math of knowing exactly who's going to be a winner, who's going to be a loser, who's going to pay more, who's going to pay less. I think it's really salient that a lot of the value of land is commercial downtown real estate. And I think that a revenue-neutral property tax shift to land where we exempt the taxation of all buildings, but collect the same amount in property taxes as we're doing now, but just from the land, and then a modest citizens dividend is a really good first step. And then over the years, you can raise the land value rate as you also decrease things like income tax and sales tax. I think that's a transition that gets us there without really screwing anyone over.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For most Americans, right? So there's this issue called that I have to grapple with, which is called Gordon Tullock's Transitional Gainstrap. So if you think about taxi medallions in like New York City, right? You know, it's like it's this artificially scarce asset that allows you to operate a taxi, right? And the first generation that got their taxi medallions basically got in cheap. And then afterwards made out like gangbusters. But the second generation had to buy those taxi medallions at the fully priced in value. And now when you come in and you're like, okay, we're going to abolish taxi medallions if like say you were going to do that, you would screw over that entire second generation who bought in good faith after the value of the asset had been fully priced in, even if you admit that the system is now unfair, removing that unfairness screws over the people who played by the quote unquote unfair rules.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, um, and that's basically my position on it. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people just, they're some of the easiest people to convince about Georgism, which was completely surprising to me. But I've learned a lot by talking to them. It's very interesting and weird”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is so weird. You know, I've gone on record as being a pretty big crypto skeptic. You know what I mean? But I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism. I mean, not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin who endorsed my book. Who's a huge fan of Georgism? It's like, I mean, I'll take fans from anywhere, even from people I've had sparring contests with. You know, I'm generally pretty skeptical that crypto can fulfill all its promises. I am excited by those promises, and if they can prove me wrong, that would be great. And I think there's some logic to what you're saying is that if we literally couldn't track transactions, then, I mean, I guess we don't have much to tax except land. I don't think that'll actually come to pass just based off of recent events.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of sympathize with Milton Friedman here, where he's like, you know, he might want to have less government than we have now, but he doesn't believe we can have no government. And then he goes on to endorse the land value tax is the least worse tax because income tax especially, I feel like is a gateway drug to the surveillance state. One of the advantages of land value taxes, you don't even care necessarily who owns the land. You're just like, hey, 4732 Apple Street. Make sure the check shows up in the mail. I don't care how many shell companies in the Bahamas you've like obscured your identity with. Just put the check in the mail, Mr. Address. You know, whereas the income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich. And it's just this horrible burden we have. And then it gives the government this kind of presumed right.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's like, I mean, if you want to take the full, if you're asking, is Georgism compatible with full anarchist libertarianism? Probably not 100%. I think we can have a little government as a treat. But I think it's not a coincidence that if you look throughout America's founding, I don't think it's a coincidence that originally people talk about it's like, oh, it used to be only white men who could vote white landowning men could vote. Like a government by the landowners for the landowners of the landowners, right? And that's very much kind of the traditional English system of government, you know, just neo-feudalism, right? And so I think Georgism certainly has a critique of that, that it's like government is often instituted to protect the interests of landowners. But what's interesting is that if you look throughout history, I'm very much a fan of democracy, you know, rule of the people. And it's like, I think.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the tax on buildings? And so that's what I think is the most plausible way to get a land value tax, like in Texas here, if we were to start by just capture the same, like what I actually propose for a first step is not 100% land value tax federally. I don't know, even know how you get to there. I think what you actually do is you start in places like Texas and like, here, legalize split rate property tax, thus retax buildings and land at separate rates, set the rate on buildings to zero, collect the same dollar amount of taxes. Let's start there. There's proposals to do this in various cities around the nation right now. I think there's one in Virginia. There's a proposal to do it in Detroit. I think there's some talk of it in Pennsylvania and some places. And I'd like to see those experiments run and observe what happens there. I think we should do it in Texas. And that would be something that I think would be very friendly to the libertarian mindset.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get this one a lot. Yeah, no. And so I have been a libertarian in my past and I have a soft spot for libertarianism. I used to be around Paul guy and went back in the day for a hot minute. And so I think the thing to assuage your concerns there is what is land value tax? It's property tax without a tax on buildings. So the natural path to actually getting land value tax comes from reforming existing property tax regimes. By reducing an entire category of taxation.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would always work. And I'm not sure if I buy that. I want to see some empirical evidence, but I think at least some weak form of it holds so that when you offset other worse taxes, not only do you get rid of the dead weight loss from those, but you also wind up raising at least a little bit more in land value tax revenue.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have room over for a little bit of extra. And so, I mean, it's up to you. That's a policy decision of whether you want to spend it on spending, whether you want to spend it on offsetting taxes, or whether you want to spend it on UBI. I think the best political solution, because if I bite the bullet that there might be some regressivity issues left over, you want to do what's called a UBI or in Georgia's time was called a citizen's dividend, right? You know, this will smooth over any remaining regressivity issues. But I very much am in favor of getting rid of some of these worst taxes. Not just because they have deadweight loss and land value tax doesn't, but also because there's this tantalizing theory called AtCore. All taxes come out of rent, which suggests that if you reduce other taxes, it increases land values, which means that if it's true in the strongest sense, it means the single tax, right? Land value tax replace all”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it depends how much UBI you want. You know what I mean? It's like you can, you know, it's a sliding skill. It's like how many taxes do you want to replace versus how much like, I mean, you can have a budget there. It's like if you can raise, you know, I've shown the book the exact figures of how much I think a land value tax could raise. And I forget the exact figures, but like you can pull up a graph and overlay it here of, you know, whether you're talking about the federal level or federal, local, and state, you know, there's $44 trillion of land value in America. And I believe we can raise about $4 trillion in land rents annually with 100% land value tax. And we probably do less than that in practice. But even on the low end, and I forget what figure I quote for the low end, like you could fully pay for any one of Social Security Medicare plus Medicaid together. So the second one is healthcare or defense, entirely with the lowest estimate of what I think land rents could raise. And then I think you can actually raise more than that because I think, and I give an argument in the book for why I think it's closer to like $4 trillion. And that could pay for all three.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because any improvement that the peasants make to the land will be a signal to the landowner to increase the rent because of Ricardo's law of rent. And that's exactly what happened in Ireland. And George talks about this in progress in poverty, is that a lot of people were like, why was there famine in Ireland? It's because the Irish are, you know, bad people. Why didn't they, they're lazy, why didn't they improve? And it's like because if you improve the land, all that happens is you still are forced into one-sided competition and the rent goes out.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“can show where most of our land value is actually concentrated, and then we can make decisions about exactly, you know, are we comfortable with these tax shifts? Yeah.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's incredibly poorly used. We have all these central parking lots downtown. That is incredibly valuable real estate. And just a couple of speculators are just sitting on it doing nothing with it. And that could be housing, that could be offices, that could be amenities, that could be a million sorts of things. And so when you're talking about a land value tax, those are the people you're going to get hit first. And those are people who are neither nice, you know, nice, friendly, upper middle class Americans, nor are they hardworking industrialists, you know, making cool stuff. They're people who are doing literally nothing. Now, if you do a full land value tax, yeah, it's going to shift the burden of society somewhat. But I feel that most analyses of property taxes and land value taxes that conclude that they are regressive, I think that's mostly done on the basis of our current assessments. And I feel like our assessments could be massively approved, improved. And that if we improve the assessments, we”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, I don't quite agree with that because it's like, although there are a lot of upper middle class Americans who own a lot of the land wealth, it's not the case that they own where the majority of the land wealth is. The majority of the land wealth in urban areas is actually in commercial real estate. The central business district, if you, and I work in mass appraisal. So I've seen this myself in the models we build, is that if you look at the transactions in cities and then you plot where the land value is in like a graph, it looks like this. And this is the city center. And that's not a residential district. So the residential districts are sucking up a lot of land value and the rent is too damn high. But the central business district, and this even holds even in the age of Zoom, it's taken a tumble, but it's starting from a very high level. That central residential, I'm not residential, but commercial real estate is super valuable. Like orders, like an order of magnitude more valuable than a lot of the other stuff. And a lot of it is very poorly used. In Houston especially,”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And are basically and also the old and the wealthy especially are essentially this entire class of kind of hidden landed gentry that are extracting wealth from the most productive people in America and young people especially. And it creates really weird patterns essentially, especially with service workers who can't afford to live in the cities where their work is demanded.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the wealthy people in our society are landowners, right? And it's just like it's not the, so the thing is, is that basically making wealth off land is a way to make wealth without being productive. Right. And so my point is that, so like you said in your interview with Glazer that it's like, okay, the Google Plex, like the value of that real estate is probably not compare that to like the market cap of Google. But now compare the value of all the real estate in San Francisco to the market caps of some of those companies in there. Look at the people who are charging rent to people who work for Google. That's where the money is actually going. And, you know, investors talk about this is that it's like I have to like, if you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line, right? You know, the money is going to basically upper middle class Americans and upper class Americans who own tons of residential.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Working class people not being able to feed their families. And so, like, the greater issue is the fact that the rent is too high rather than that Jeff Bezos is obscenely rich.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so the thing is, one of the big misapprehensions people have is that when they think of billionaires, they think of people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Those are actually the minority billionaires. Most billionaires are hedge funds are people involved in hedge funds, bankers. And what are bankers? What are two-thirds of banks? It's real estate. And so, but more to your point, like if it is point that directly into it, it's like, I don't necessarily have a problem with a billionaire existing. You know what I mean? If someone like genuinely brings something new into the world and I don't necessarily buy the narrative that like billionaires are solely responsible, everything that good that comes out of their company, you know, I think they like to present that image. But I don't necessarily have a problem with a billionaire existing. I have a problem with”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, well, so it has to do with two things. So, first of all, it's over the long run. And so it's like you've had a lot of productivity booms in San Francisco, right? And so it takes some time for that to be priced in, you know, and it can be over a while. But given a long enough time period, it'll eventually get there. And then when we're talking about stuff, it's also based off of the average productivity. The average resident of San Francisco is maybe not as productive as a high, like basically doesn't earn as high an income necessarily as a high income productive worker. And so this means that if you are a higher than higher than average productivity person, it's worth it to live in the expensive town because you're being paid more than the average productivity that's captured in rent, right? But if you're lower than average productivity, you flee high productive areas. You go to more marginal areas because those are the only places you can basically afford to make a living.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Landowners can charge up to that margin. The other limit is subsistence. They can't charge more than you're actually able to pay. But the basic example is that. So this is why, this is how Frontier expansion works. When the entire continent is free, the first settler comes in, strikes a pick in the ground, keeps all of their wealth. But as more and more of it gets consolidated, then landowners are able to charge proportionately more until they're charging essentially up to subsistence.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wealth in, but it's owned by a landowner. Why would you go and work on the landowners when you're going to have to pay them rent? You wouldn't pay him any rent at all. You would work on the field that's free. But if the landowner buys that field and now your best opportunity is a field that's only worth a free field that will produce 10 units of wealth, now he can charge you ninety units of wealth because you have no opportunity to go anywhere else. And so basically as more land gets bought and subject to private ownership in an area, landowners over time get to increase the rent not to a maximum level. There are limits to it. And the limits is what's called the margin of production, which is basically you can charge up to, and this is where the competition comes in.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of an area as it goes up that gets soaked into the land prices and the mechanism by that is that it's like okay say I want to buy a watermelon right there's only one watermelon we'll have to outbid that guy but the watermelon grower is going to be like oh a lot of people want watermelon so next season there's going to be more watermelons because he's going to produce more watermelons but because there's only so many locations in Austin you know within the natural limits of our transportation network basically it forces the competition on the side of the people who are essentially the tenants right it forces us into one sided competition with each other and that and so there's an example of like a simple agricultural example is like okay say there is a common field that anyone can work on and you can make a hundred units of wealth if you work on it right so um and there's another field that you can also earn a hundred units of”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other. Right. Well, what they do is because the nature of the scarcity of, there's only so many locations in Manhattan and there's so many people who want to live there, right? And so all the people who want to live there have to outbid each other. And so basically, let me give a simple agricultural example model. And then I will explain how the agricultural model translates to a residential model. Basically, when you are paying to live in an urban area or any suburban area like here in Austin, what you're actually paying for is the right to have proximity to realize the productive capacity of that location, i.e., like, I want to live in Austin because I can have access to a good job. You know what I mean? Or whatever's cool about Austin, a good school, those amenities. And the problem is you have to pay for those and you have to outbid other people who are willing to pay for those. And Ricardo's Rolf Rent says that the value of the amenities and the product”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so this is Ricardo's law of rent, right? And there's a section on in the book with a bunch of illustrations you can show. And so the issue is that we can't make more land, right? And so you might be like, well, there's plenty of land in Nevada. But the point is there's only so much land in Manhattan.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, it really disrupted the southern economy when we got rid of slavery, but it was still the right thing to do. And so, I mean, there is no magic button I could push as much as I might like to do so that will give us 100% land value tax everywhere in America tomorrow. So I think in the actual path towards a Georgia's future is going to have to be incremental, there'll be enough time to unwind all those investments and get to a more sane banking sector. So, I mean. Like, if we were to go overnight, yeah, I think there would be some shocks in the banking sector, and I can't predict what those would be, but I also don't think that's a risk that's actually going to happen. Because we just cannot make a radical change like that on all levels overnight.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, if you okay, so like this is kind of like, I mean, I'm not trying to compare landlords to slave owners or something, but it's like the South had an entire economy based off of slavery, this thing that we now agree was bad, right? And it's like we shouldn't have kept slavery because the South...”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now we've come at the end of that frontier, and now we're at the same question. It's like you see this resurge in interest in leftism in America, and that's not a coincidence, right? Because the rent is too damn high and poor people and young people feel really, really shoved out of the promise and social contract that was given to their parents and they're jealous of it and they're wondering where it went.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You either have land reform or you have revolution. And it's either like either you have a never-ending cycle of transfers of income from the unlanded to the landed and eventually the unlanded will not put up with that. There was a real chance in the end of the 19th century of America going full-on socialist or communist and the only thing that saved us and George's argument was like, it's either Georgism or communism. And if you want to save capitalism and not go to totalitarian, we need Georgism. And then what George failed to anticipate was, of course, the automobile. And the automobile kicked the can down another generation, another couple generations, right? And it came at the cost of sprawl. And that made everyone feel like we had solved the issue. But basically, we just, and the costs of sprawl are enormous in terms of pollution and poor land use. Just look at Houston right now, right?”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The difference is that people are now paying an ever-increasing portion of their incomes to the land sector. And that didn't used to be the case. And if it keeps going, it's going to be, I mean, you have people who are now paying 50% of their income just for rent. And that's not sustainable in the long term. You're going to have the cycle you have there is revolution. No, I'm serious. Like what happens is like you look through history.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pollution and climate change issues. And so with regards to speculations, like even if I just bite that bullet and it's like, okay, speculation is good actually, I don't think anyone's made the case that speculators need to capture 100% of the rents to be properly incentivized to do anything good that comes out of speculation. I think at some small, reasonable percentage, you know, 5 to 10% of the rents, maybe 15 if I'm feeling generous, but I don't think anyone's empirically made the case that it should be 100%.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Necessarily, you know, and so the problem is that speculation in the sense you're talking about of like encouraging people to do arbitrage is good for capital because we can make more capital, but we can't make more land and we can't make more non-renewable natural resources. And the issue empirically, and I just think the evidence just doesn't support that empirically, because if anything, land speculation has causes land values to just constantly increase, not to find some natural part, especially with how easy it is to finance two-thirds of bank loans just chase real estate up. And that's just like, if you just look at the history of the prices of residential real estate in America, it's like, it's not this cyclical graph where it keeps going back down. It keeps going back down, but it keeps going up and up and up just on a straight line along with productivity. And it underlines and undergirds major everything that's driving our housing crisis, which then undergirds so much of inequality.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of offshore oil drilling. Well, Norway's like, well, if you just need to cover the cost of offshore oil drilling, we'll subsidize that. We'll just pay you. We'll just pay you to discover the oil. But when you find the oil, that oil belongs to the Norwegian people. Now you may keep some of the rents, but most of it goes to the Norwegian people. But hey, all your R&D is free. All your discovery is free. If the problem is discovery, we just subsidize discovery. And then the oil companies are like, okay, that sounds like a great deal. We don't have to because without that, what the oil companies do is that they're like, okay, we're taking all these risks. So I'm going to sit on all these oil wells like people sitting on domain names because I might use them later. And the price might go up later. But now because there's a huge severance tax, you're forced to drill now and actual costs of discovery and R&D and all those capital costs are just taken care of.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a high land value tax, but make sure not to go over. And so that would leave a sliver of land rent that would still presumably incentivize this sort of thing. There's no argument for why 100% of the land rent is necessary to incentivize the good things that capital is talking about. The second argument is when he talks about oil, well, we have the empirical evidence from the Norwegian massively successful petroleum model that shows in the case of natural resources how you should deal with this. And what Norway does is that they have a massive, massively huge severance tax on oil extraction. And according to Kaplan's argument, this would massively destroy the incentive for companies to go out there and discover the oil. And empirically it doesn't. Now, what Norway does is that they figured out, okay, so the oil companies, their argument is that we need the oil rents, right? We need these oil rents or we will not be incentivized for the massive capital cost.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't practically do anyway because of natural limitations just empirically, you know, in the signal. It's like you don't want to do 115% land value tax. That drives people off the land. So we want to make sure that we like”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah. No, so I've read that paper. So, first of all, the first author of that, Zachary Gelchener. I've not been able to pin him down on what exactly meant on this, but he's made some public statements where he's revised his opinion since writing that paper and that he's much more friendly to the arguments of Georgism now than when he first wrote that paper. So I'd like to pin him down and see exactly what he meant by that because it was just a passing comment. But as regards Kaplan's critique, Kaplan's critique only applies to a 100% LVT, where you fully capture all of the land value tax. And the most extreme Georgia side know are only advocating for an 85% land value tax. That would still leave, and Kaplan doesn't account at all for the negative effects of speculation. He's making a speculation as good, actually, argument. And even if we grant his argument, he still needs to grapple with all the absolutely empirically observed problems of land speculation. And if we want to make some kind of compromise between maybe speculation could have this good discovery effect, there's two really good answers to that. First, just don't do 100% LVT, which we probably.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Houses like this over in Austin have gone up in value because there is demand for them to telecommute. And so anyone who increased demand for living out in the suburbs is now basically priced in because of the Zoom economy. And so the thing is the first people who did that, who got there really quick, the first people to log into the Ultim Online server were able to claim that pace of the frontier and capture that value. But the next generation has to pay more in rent and more in home prices to get that.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because these things have a cost, right? The cost of frontier expansion was murdering all the Indians, and the cost of automobile expansion was climate change. You know, there has to be a price for that. And then eventually the problem is eventually when you get to the end of that frontier expansion, you wind up with the same problem we had in the first place. Eventually, the problem is the first generation will make out like gangbusters if we ever invent flying cars, even better like Star Trek Matter teleporters. You know, that'll really do it. Then you can really live in Nevada and have a job in New York. There are some people who claim that Zoom is this, but it's not. We've seen the empirical effects of that. And it's like, it's the weakest semi-frontier we've had, and it's already closed. Because of Zoom.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can get productive land and realize the gains of that. The second frontier expansion was after Henry George's death was the invention of the automobile, the ability to have a job in the city, but not have to live in the city. The fact that you could quickly travel in, like I commuted in to visit you here, right? That is because of the automobile frontier opening that has allowed me to live in some other city but be able to do productive work like this podcast. By driving in, but the problem is Sprawl can only take you so far before that frontier as well closes and by closes I don't mean suburban expansion stops. What I mean is that now suburban homes you fully price in the value of the benefits you're able to accrue by having that proximity to a city but still being able to live over here through of course Ricardo's law rent.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“America and I like to say that America's tragedy, America's problem is that America is a country that has the mindset of being a frontier state, but is in fact a state which has lost its frontier. And that is why you have these conversations with people like Boomers who are like, why can't the next generation just pull itself up by its bootstraps? Because America has had at least, I would say, two major periods of frontier expansion. The first was the actual frontier, the West, the Oregon Trail, the covered wagons, you know, the displacement of the Indians. And so that was a massive, that was the time in which Henry George was writing, was right when that frontier was closing, right? When all that land, that free land was being taken and the advantages of that land was now being fully priced in. That is what it means for a frontier to close, is that now the good productive land, the value of it is fully priced on when the frontier is open, you can just go out there and take it.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but what is scarce is specific locations. They're non-fungible, you know, and to a certain extent it's like, okay, if you don't want to live in New York, you can live in San Francisco or any other big city. But what makes New York, New York, is non-fungible. What makes San Francisco San Francisco is non-fungible. That particular cluster of VCs in San Francisco until or unless that city completely explodes and that moved somewhere else to Austin or whatever, you know, at which point Austin will be non-fungible. I mean, Austin is non-fungible right now. And so the point is that the way Georgism unlocks the abundance mindset, let me talk about the frontier. We have done frontier expansion. That is why immigrants came over from Europe and then eventually the rest of the world to America to, you know, settle the frontier and the losers of that equation were, of course, the Indians who were already here and got kicked out. But that was the original idea of.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fungible commodity. Location really matters. America has a finite amount of land, but it might as well be an infinite plane. We're not going to fill up every square inch of America for probably thousands of years, if we ever do.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, okay. So I love this question because actually our current status quo mindset is a scarcity mindset. And Georgism is the abundance mindset, right? And we can have that abundance if we learn to share the land because right now, you know, why don't we expand? And the answer is we've tried that. We've done it twice. And it's the story of America's frontier, right? And so like right now, there's plenty of empty land in Nevada, but nobody wants it. And you have to ask why, right? You also have to ask the question of how did we have virtual housing crises in the metaverse where they could infinitely expand all they want? Like, how is that even possible? You know, and the answer has to do with what we call the urban agglomeration effect. What's really valuable is human relationships, proximity to other human beings, those dense networks of human beings. And so the idea is not necessarily that like in a certain sense, the issue is that land is not an indistinguishable.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And has been for like 10 years, and it's a similar phenomenon. It's like some of it is economic rational following of incentives. And some of it is just, it's like, well, this is a good asset. I'm just going to hold on to it because why not? And no one is, and I don't have any pressure to build right now. And this happens on the upswing end on the downswing of cities. So while the population is growing and while the population is declining, people will just buy a lot of land and hold it out of use because it's also just a great place to park money because it's an asset that you know if the population ever starts growing, it's going to keep its value better than almost any other hard asset you have.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like, I should probably release all the ones I have no intent of using because I was looking for a domain for my startup the other day and every single two word.com is taken.”
2023-01-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Lars Doucet — Progress, poverty, Georgism, & why rent is too damn high · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source